


Funeral March

by Skinandpit



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death, F/M, Ghosts, Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 22:31:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skinandpit/pseuds/Skinandpit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The late Eduardo Saverin comes back wrong. He goes looking for his wife, Erica, to make certain that she's his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Funeral March

**Erica**

_Erica is twelve when her family goes on their first vacation. They stay in a little house by the sea._

_The ocean is cold and hard and angry. She spends six days rushing headlong into the water, the waves knocking the breath right out of her body._

_The whole week they are there, her lips taste like salt. They crack and bleed and she keeps licking them, the salt burning her tongue._

_Under the water everything is quiet, but it is not calm. It shifts, casting her whole body one way or another, the whisper of distant currents. It pushes her backwards and pulls her forwards, and she pushes back, seaweed grasping at his ankles, her body strong and brave agains the force of a whole ocean, nothing but her muscles fighting back against a tidal pull.   When her feet touch the seafloor they sink deep into it, the ground soft and yielding._

_For weeks afterwards she remembers that feeling. She remembers it when Dorothy Winger starts up a rumor about things she did with boys she barely knows and she remembers it when Patrick Lee calls her a bitch because she refuses to go on a date with him. She remembers it when she’s rejected from her top choice school, when none of the art programs she applied to turn out to want her.   She is strong. There is nothing that can move her if she does not want to be moved, not even the force of the whole moon._

 

**Eduardo**

 Eduardo is cold, colder than he has ever been. It feels like he has been outside in a thunderstorm for hours. His skin feels beaten. His face is pressed against stone, and there is something sharp digging into his cheek.   At first he does not know where he is. His brain is shrouded in deep fog, as if he has woken from a deep sleep. More tangibly, his vision is clouded -- he can see nothing but grey and a streak of sea-green.   It smells like saltwater and the acrid scent of decaying animal matter, but he can’t place where it comes from. It’s like the name of a person he hasn’t seen for years.

He rubs his eyes.  

When he opens them again, he is lying on the stone shore of a beach. There is no sand, only stones, and the sea itself is bottle-green and wild beneath a grey sky. There are strings of kelp on the shore. They look like the tentacles of beached sea monsters.   Behind him is a forest, lush and dark. He has an image of a woman within it, her hair tangling in goatsbeard moss.   He crawls to his feet, and looks around him.

He thinks, I know this place.

He thinks, this is my home.

He knows these things the way he knows the position of muscles atrophied from lack of use. Eduardo weighs these thoughts, steadily, considering. He has never been a forgetful person, and so the experience is unfamiliar to him, but he feels no panic and no fear. The whole world is solid in a way that it has never been before.

Out loud, he says: Erica.

The name feels bright as blood.

He needs to find Erica.

Erica, his love. Erica, his wife. Erica with her long hair and her acid laugh and her eyes so compassionate that he thinks she could tame wolves. Erica will know what is wrong. Erica will explain how he came to be here, sopping wet on the stones.

 He turns.

 In the forest, there is a narrow path, trodden dirt winding its way beneath the trees. He follows that.

 

**Erica**

_Erica Albright goes to Boston University, which is not prestigious but which is a good fit for her. She learns accounting. Her best friend is a boy named Eduardo Saverin, who earned three hundred thousand dollars in the summer betting on oil futures, and who goes to Harvard but spends all his time hanging around her like a lonely puppy because he hasn’t got any friends there. He has a lot of connections, though, and it’s partially that which helps her land her first job, a well-paying position at a bank._

_It is not what she wants to do with her life, but it gives her financial security and that is adequate._

_She buys herself a house by the ocean and invites Eduardo out there constantly. They lay out milk for the brownies, marveling and laughing when they wake to their house magically clean. They put cream in the backyard and find, later, fairy circles of mushrooms trodden down and wet with dew.   At night they bring cold chicken and flashlights out to the rocks by the sea and eat beneath the stars, the sound of water lapsing slow and languid against the stones. Eduardo is hopelessly neurotic but on these nights his smile slows down and spreads out, gets sloppy as if he were drunk, although they only bring wine out there once, because there’s something about drinking wine by the seaside that makes the whole thing feel like a page ripped out of a glossy magazine. She likes it the way it is, raw and complicated, the crash of waves, the smell of salt thick in her nostrils._

_There is a certain melancholy to it._

_“This is enough,” Eduardo says to her, one of these nights. It is a crescent moon and his face is hard to make out. She squints at the sea instead, the moonlight glittering off it, turning the waves into knives. “Isn’t it?”_

_She wants to pretend she doesn’t know what he means. The enormity of it. Their lives, stretched out together. Is it adequate? She thinks maybe everyone feels this dissatisfied, maybe it’s not just them, maybe its just inevitable result of human consciousness. She isn’t unhappy. She shrugs and leans into him, for the first time, his body warm against hers, and hears him go suddenly silent as he holds his breath._

 

**Eduardo**

The forest is dark and quiet and it hangs thick with vegetation. He drags his hand across the tree trunks as he passes to feel their bark, feel the lichen that which clings to them.

It is wet. Everything is wet.   He knows that he is missing something important, but he can’t figure out what it is.

He wonders if he’s lost his keys, or his wallet. Erica will know. Erica knows everything.  The clouds are so thick that he can’t see the sun except sometimes as a hazy thing, as if it were six feet below the waves.

His heart is pounding the way it always has. He feels too much. He thinks too much. He loves in a desperate way, and it does not make him endearing, not like it does for the men on television who stand outside their lover’s bedrooms with boomboxes and lawnmowers and love letters and cut flowers. It makes him embarrassing, and difficult to deal with.   His father used to stand above him and say, control yourself. But he couldn’t. His heart always bursting out of him. He wears suits instead, pins himself together with black fabric and button-ups and sometimes the knot of a tie. It is not enough. He is still too much, too needy, too wanting.

He thinks, Erica was enough.   He thinks, Erica was his.

 

**Erica**

_Their marriage is inevitable._

_He proposes in a restaurant and she cries and says yes. She is married in a white gown. He wears a black suit. He kisses gently at the alter and their families are all there, hers beaming, his bearing expressions of strange and extraordinary relief._

_They do not marry by the sea. They marry in a church, with a service before and a polite reception afterwards._

_The Saverins are a strange family. They love her, and that’s pleasant, but there’s a strange note to it. A something that doesn’t make sense. When she asks Eduardo he shuts his eyes, pushes his fingertips into the bridge of his nose. They are lying in bed, three weeks after the wedding, in the late hours of the day._

_“They thought I was gay,” he says. “In high school. There was this boy -- but that doesn’t matter anymore. You’re the fulfillment of all their hopes.”_

_“And you?” she asks._

_“What?”_

_“Am I the fulfillment of yours?”   He smiles and nuzzles her throat. “Of course,” he says, and she believes him. It’s only that their hopes are smaller than she remembers them being._

 

**Eduardo**

Running his hands along the trees, he becomes aware that there is something strange about his skin. He lifts his hands up and looks at them under the pale moonlight.

They are mottled grey, coloured in odd irregular patches. He frowns and folds them together.   His skin is clammy.  When he presses his fingers into it, they sink inwards.   Erica used to take his hands as they sat together on the stones where he’d woken. She would fold them into her own and smile at him, sure and crooked, all her expressions built on a solid bedrock. He can’t remember what they talked about. He thinks they might have eaten together -- something cold, a bird.   His wedding band is tarnished with saltwater. He tugs at it, intending to clean it on his shirt, but it is stuck fast.   There are barnacles clinging to it. Eduardo scrapes them away with his fingernail, then tries the ring again, but it’s changed nothing.

Ahead of him, he can see the forest’s edge, where the trees open up into light and mown grass and the dirt path becomes a stone one.

It begins to rain.

 

**Erica**

_“Are you happy?” he asks, one night on the rocks. The stars are spread like spilt milk above them and the water below is choppy. There are saltspit stains on the stones. It is the most honest question Eduardo has ever asked, and so she gives it the courtesy of deliberation._

_The silence stretches between them, thin and cold, and she thinks of swimming as a child. There are no waves, now. There is only clear sea._

_“I am,” she says, and it isn’t a lie. She’s happy. She’s satisfied. It’s just not all that she imagined._

_He stills, and turns to look at her. “Erica,” he says, his voice cracking, and it’s that which makes the hard thing inside of her melt. She is, quite suddenly and quite vividly, aware of her longing for something more than the easy thing.   She rests her head on his shoulder, on the hard jutting bone. “We need to fix this,” she says, and Eduardo pulls her close, holds her tight._

_“I know.”_

_But how, is the question that needs answering. It seems to Erica that they are unfixable, not because they are so badly damaged but because there is nothing which has broken. Things have simply moved forward and come out of alignment. Come undone, without anything specific having cut the chords._

_Erica knows what to do with crash-and-burn but she doesn’t know what to do with this. A slow cooling of the embers. A nothingness that creeps in like a fog._

_In the end, it doesn’t matter._

_Eduardo dies in March._

_He drowns._

_Erica scatters his ashes into the water._

 

**Eduardo**

There is rainwater all around him, but he is so wet already that it scarcely matters. The water plasters his hair to his face, fills up his lips. He wipes at his face. It is hard to see through the rain.   His skin is rough, and when he reaches up he finds more barnacles crusted to his skin. Embarrassed, he tries to drag them off, but his skin peels with his nails so he stops.

His house is small and rickety and there are concrete blocks below its foundation to keep it off the sinking ground. They found a raccoon beneath it, once. Erica dealt with it. He can’t remember how.   They used to spent thunderstorms together on the balcony, watching the winds crash against trees and the rain fall sideways.

He thinks, she’s in there.

He thinks, good.

 

**Erica**

_Erica does not wear black. It would feel like playacting. She preforms her complicated mourning in silence and in colours instead, and everyone says how wonderfully that she is coping._

_What she feels, primarily, is grief. Deep and fathomless, heavy as an undertow, she is afraid of swimming too close to it for fear that she will be dragged under.   Under that is the guilt. She fears she did not love him deeply enough. It would have made no difference to his living or dying, but it would be -- she thinks, knowing this is irrational -- more appropriate to the situation._

_Two years pass. She grows quieter, more solemn. She quits her job and takes another one, lower paying but with less hours.   One day she goes to the store and buys herself a set of paints. There is a sign advertising a free art class on the door, so she signs up for it, and it is there that she meets Zuckerberg._

 

**Eduardo**

There are four steps leading up to the door.  

His heart is shuddering.

He thinks of his father. Too much, Eduardo. No one likes an emotional boy.

He reaches for the doorknob and turns, but the door is locked and he doesn’t have a key, so instead he pushes and the door snaps and splinters inwards as easily as if it had rotted from the inside out.

There are shoes in the entranceway. They are not his. They are flip-flops, black, and Eduardo has never worn flip-flops a day in his life. They sit neatly next to a pair of women’s shoes -- black, Erica’s.   The flip-flops are a man’s flip-flops.

Eduardo breathes out.  

It’s okay, he thinks. Erica is mine.

Then he wonders where that thought came from. He has never thought of himself as a possessive person. Clingy, maybe. Desperate. But not possessive. He does not own anyone. And more than that, he trusts Erica -- it is ludicrous to think that she would find another person the moment he steps outside of the house. She has male friends. She has her own life.

He thinks, again, that he is missing something.

 His hand hurts.

He looks down, and there are thick splinters of wood sticking out of it, buried deep. His breath catches in his throat. He reaches out, tugs experimentally on one. It slides out easily. It does not hurt. There is no blood. He looks at it curiously, without fear, and pulls out another sliver of wood.

Then he turns towards the bedroom.

 

**Erica**

_The first time they make love, she wakes slowly, comfortably, twisting beneath the cold sheets, frozen morning light spilling through the window. It takes a moment to orient herself, to realize: she is naked, and Mark is beside her, in an equal state of undress, his spine and near well the whole of his ribcage visible through his thin pale skin. There are twin bruises beneath his ribs.   She sits up, letting the blanket fall from her, and wraps her arms around herself. She smiles._

_Mark stirs. He mumbles something into the pillows, then twists towards her, pawing awkwardly at her for a moment -- catching her hip, catching her knee, and she takes his hand gently and folds it in her own. His hands are freezing. They feel like they’ve just been removed from the refrigerator.   “You have terrible circulation,” she tells him._

_Groggily, he looks up at her. His eyes, this early in the morning, are devoid of all that sharpness -- he looks innocent as a schoolboy for a moment, and then all of a sudden they flash wide with wonder, like she were a landscape he was looking on for the first time._

_“Erica,” he says._

_She smiles. “Yes, that’s right. I’m glad you remember my name.” They have been together for four months, now._

_He sits up, slowly, then leans into her and nuzzles her shoulder, aligning the whole of his bird-thin body along hers. Erica has been gaining wait, which bothered her at first and which she’s gradually grown to like, this new softness in her body, this new solidness, and now the contrast between her and Mark, who looks perpetually in need of feeding. “Erica,” he says again, then looks down and prods at his ribs. “You broke me.”_

_“I didn’t.”_

_“You did. Did you know that the coloration of bruises comes from the breakdown of red blood cells?”_

_“I did, actually.” Erica leans down to kiss his nose. Mark wrinkles it up, and lets her._

_“Do you want something to eat?”_

_“Um -- sure?”_

_“Cool.”_

_Mark squirms to the edge of the bed, then reaches down to put on sweatpants before sliding out of the covers and slipping out the door.   She follows him a few minutes later, after she’s brushed her teeth and smoothed out her hair with her fingers, and finds him making a feast for breakfast, bacon and eggs and toast and fruit and yogurt in tall thin cups layered with syrup and raspberries, and she says, Mark, what are you doing, and he says I’m starving, Erica, it’s your fault, you made me starving and then his eyes dance away, shy, waiting quiet for her approval. He reminds her of a stray cat that’s spent a few years in a home, gangly and sharp clawed and uncertain and hopelessly in love._

 

**Eduardo**

He pushes open the door to the bedroom.

He has done this a thousand times before. There is something wonderful about returning, as if from a long voyage, back home, back to the familiar.

Erica.

He sees her, curled beneath the covers, her form soft and settling --

\-- and then he starts back, because there is another bundle of blankets beside her.

 

**Erica**

_They marry in April, in a park, beside the weeping willows. She wears a green dress and they discuss the possibility of Mark showing up in a hoodie and flip-flops before deciding on a suit anyway, for the sake of propriety._

_Mark likes to sleep with his back to hers.   She falls asleep, often, to the sound of his breathing, to the gentle movements of his ribcage._

 

**Eduardo**

He steps into the room.

There is water pooling beneath his feet, more than there should be, considering the rain.  The man is small, all bones and golden hair and Eduardo hates him. He is lying there beside his wife, and he has no right, none at all.   His presence does not disturb Eduardo so much as his familiarity.

Eduardo crawls onto the bed.

He reaches for Erica.

She is his. She is his. She is his.

 No one else can have her.

 

**Erica**

_She wakes in the night to an impossible thing.   Eduardo’s breath is hot against her cheek but his skin is cold, cold as the grave. He smells like must and cloying funeral-grade flowers. His knees are digging into her chest and there are spots in her vision as she struggles to breathe. She thinks, bizarrely, of cats, the way they’re supposed to suck your breath out as you sleep. She can see through Eduardo’s skin._

_“Don’t,” she gasps out._

_He hisses through his teeth and it sounds like pipes bursting. “Erica.”_

_She squirms under Eduardo’s grasp. “Wardo, you’re --”_

_“Erica.” His voice sounds distant and aching, like churchbells ringing far away._

_She spits out, “You’re killing me.”_

_And, bizarrely, he draws back, his hands pulling away from her throat. He leaps away, hovering like mist, and the pressure on her chest is gone. Erica sucks in air, gasping wildly, her vision fragmenting into a thousand shades of purple._

_There are hands at her throat again, hot hands, and she struggles away again but when her vision clears she sees it’s just Mark, his eyes wide, terrified, face washed of color. He’s holding her up and then he folds her to his chest and she falls against his neck, her eyes shut, balling her fists up into the fabric of his shirt._

_She thinks she’s crying, but she doesn’t know for sure until she feels Mark put his arms around her._

_“Just a nightmare,” he says. “Nothing else.”_

 

**Eduardo**

No one else.

  No one else.

He will make her his, he will draw her breath, he will --

She says, “You’re killing me.”

He hears that.

He draws his hands away, horrified.

His hands are mottled grey. They collapse at a touch. He leaps back from Erica, looks at the places where wood has gone through them and there has been no blood. He thinks, no.

He remembers the surf.

He remembers the water, rising. Choking him.

He remembers the ache of saltwater down his throat, grabbing at his lungs, his air dragged out of him and his body thrashing, first under his own steam and then in desperate involuntary spasms and then not at all.

He can’t --

There is rot on his hands.

He turns to Erica and the boy with the gold hair and he looks at them, his hands around her, her head resting against the bones of his body. They don’t seem to see him.

He has always felt too much. He has always been too much. It has always been in the way.

It has turned him into an ugly thing, a thing that almost killed her, almost stole her air and her light and her life. He wonders if maybe --

He thinks about how he loves her. He does it differently this time. It takes effort -- he hadn’t noticed, before, the new downwards slope of his thoughts, the gravity that dragged them towards twisted things. He thinks of her. He doesn’t think how he owns her.  He thinks of her hair tangling in goatsbeard moss.   He thinks of her hair in her face as she bent over a book she was reading on her own.  He thinks of her smile, rising unbidden in response to something her friends said while he passed through the room.

He thinks of her.

The room is warmer, now. He is still dripping wet but his skin is not cold. He looks at his hands, hoping to see them flush with living warmth, but they are still grey and crusted with detritus from the sea. He supposes he can’t have everything.

He looks at the two of them again, his arms tight, her body falling into his. He wonders if he can trust this new boy, then realizes it probably doesn’t matter -- it’s out of his hands now, and into Erica’s. He trusts her.

Eduardo exhales, then walks out the door, into the rain.


End file.
